Thursday, April 12, 2012

Revision Party’s 2012 demoparty just concluded in southwest Germany. The event which took place from April 6th to 9th of 2012 in Saarbruecken, Germany, saw hundreds of entries from demosceners pushing the limits of what can be done in a single 64KB executable file. According to the rules of the competition, entries cannot be larger than 64 kilobytes for the executable (4KB for the 4KB competition), which is barely enough for an image but apparently plenty for code. Using extensive procedural techniques and compression, demosceners created stunning realtime animations, featuring high quality rendering, sound, 3D models, and textures. The most noteworthy example in the competition was the winning entry titled Gaia Machina by Approximate.

For those who are not aware of demoscene, here is the Wikipedia description.

The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer. The main goal of a demo is to show off programming, artistic, and musical skills.

The demoscene first appeared during the 8-bit era on computers such as the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Atari 800 and Amstrad CPC, and came to prominence during the rise of the 16/32-bit home computers (Mainly the Amiga or Atari ST). In the early years, demos had a strong connection with software cracking[citation needed]. When a cracked program was started, the cracker or his team would take credit with a graphical introduction called a "crack intro" (shortened cracktro). Within a year or two[1], the making of intros and standalone demos evolved into a new subculture independent of the software (piracy) scene.